some reason the other boys saw me as an easy—and early—target. To start with it was whispers about money. People accusing me of stealing from the other boys. Suggesting that money had gone missing from pockets and dorms. I tried to ignore it, thinking it would pass. And then they started talking about my mum. Insinuating that my “greed” ran in the family, that she was a shameless gold-digger who’d ensnared my dad for his money.
‘She’s from a different background from my dad, her family wasn’t well off and his is loaded, and she married him when he was a widow with a three-year-old. That seemed to be all the evidence the boys needed.
‘I couldn’t ignore these whispers. I started to fight back, to defend my mum and myself, and it escalated. The older boys were determined to show me that answering back would get me nowhere. It turned violent, and nasty. I hadn’t told anyone what was going on, but after a beating that left me bruised and heaving, I knew that I had to do something. My older brother—half-brother—was at school with me.’
‘Did he help?’
Leo steeled himself to answer, but found his throat was thick, and his eyes stung. Even after all this time, he still couldn’t think about what had happened without being close to tears.
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Rachel said gently. ‘I’m sure it must have been terrible, but it was a long time ago. You left that place—’
‘Yes, and I will never go back.’
‘Of course not, Leo. You’re a grown man. No one can make you go back to school.’
He snatched his hand back, frustrated that after explaining the parts of his past that still caused the occasional nightmare, she could brush it off with ‘you don’t have to go back to school’.
‘But I had to go back then.’ The words burst out of him, just short of a roar. He’d had to go back time after time, year after year. Stuck in that place every day with the boys who hated him. Who thought up new and different ways to torture him.
‘Couldn’t you have left?’
‘You think I didn’t want that? Even when I eventually told my father what was going on he didn’t take it seriously. The bullies closed ranks when my parents spoke to the school. Told the headmaster that the bruises were from rugby. Or that I’d started a fight. They were so convincing. All the teachers fell for it. Sometimes even I found myself wondering if I was imagining it all. If I was going mad.
‘I was trapped. Every morning I’d wake up in that dorm, and knew how my torture would pan out for the day. Taunts in the bathroom during break. Starving at lunch, too scared to risk the dinner hall. A few kicks in the changing rooms after games, somewhere it wouldn’t show when I was dressed. And at night, I was locked in with them.
‘The days the school knew where I would be and when, they would know, too. And ever since—I’ve needed a way out. The thought of being trapped—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘It terrifies me, Rachel.’
‘You think I trapped you?’ Her voice was flat and sad, more disappointed than angry.
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Whether you did or not, it doesn’t change the fact that—’
‘That you want to escape and you can’t.’
He rubbed his head in his hands, fighting against the fear to find the logic in his argument. ‘I don’t even know if I want to escape. What I would want if I wasn’t...’
‘Stuck.’
He nodded. ‘You probably think I’m a complete jerk for telling you all this.’ He felt like one. For admitting all the reasons he was terrified of what their lives were going to become.
She shook her head, though her expression was grim. ‘I don’t. I’m glad you told me how you feel. You can’t help thinking the way that you do. I just wish it were...different.’
He reached past her to pluck a small piece of driftwood from the sand. The light played on it as he turned it over, and he kept his eyes focused on that, rather than meeting Rachel’s gaze.
‘How did you cope—at school?’
He looked across at her now, surprised she wanted to know more after what he’d just told her.
‘I spent a lot of time at the beach.’
‘Surfing? Swimming?’
‘Some of the time. I was lucky in a way— the school was only a couple of miles from the coast, so I was able to spend a lot of time there. When I had to be on campus, I escaped to the art studio.’ She looked at him in surprise. For some reason, he enjoyed that, throwing off her preconceptions of him. He was even able to crack a smile at her gaping expression.
‘The art studio?’
‘Yes—I’m an artist, didn’t I mention that?’
‘An artist.’ She said the word as if it were something alien, obviously not believing him. He nodded, still playing with the driftwood as he took in her dropped jaw, her hands indignantly planted in the sand either side of her. ‘You’re an artist.’
A laugh escaped him, surprising him as much as her. ‘I’m sure I mentioned it before.’
‘And I’m certain that you didn’t. What sort of artist?’ She still hadn’t wiped the incredulity from her face and he wasn’t sure whether to be amused or annoyed that she found the idea of his occupation, vocation—whatever you wanted to call it—so laughable.
‘A successful one, thankfully. That’s what I wanted to show you this afternoon—my studio’s down here rather than up on the cliff.’
‘Right.’ She drew the syllable out, as she examined his face, looking for hints of his artistic temperament perhaps. ‘And the beachcombing, where does that fit into this?’
He breathed a sigh of relief that they were back on safer conversational ground. That she’d listened to his painful story, offered support, but moved on when he needed to. And his work he could talk about for hours. ‘It’s one of my favourite ways to find inspiration for my work and materials for the house. I’ve incorporated a lot of driftwood in the build. It’s an ecologically sound way of working.’
‘But doesn’t it leave you at the mercy of the tides, or the water gods, or whatever force it is that throws up driftwood onto beaches? Wouldn’t it just be easy to order the whole lot at once? I’m sure that there are suppliers with good green credentials.’
‘I could do, I suppose, but I’m happy just taking opportunities as they arise. You never know what you’re going to find. Like the floorboards for the living room. They just turned up in a reclamation yard. I could have bought brand-new timber last week and would have missed out on all that gorgeous character.’
‘Yes, but you would have had a floor for a week by now.’
He threw her a grin and nudged her with his shoulder. ‘What is it, princess? Upset that the place wasn’t perfect for you?’
‘Oh, don’t give me “princess”. I just think that while your way of doing things sounds
